Generalised
ambitions and wishful thinking are all very
well, but
it would be sensible, I suggest, to do just a little
serious
thinking before committing yourself to months of
work.
As my
family never cease to remind me, I am something
of a
fanatic about making lists. I am laughed at, kindly,
both to my
face and behind my back (I believe). Well, that
doesn’t
bother me. I find it useful to make lists. Not only do
I make
lists, I also prioritise them. I
will never, even in my
dreams,
succeed in doing all those things that I would like
to do. But
at least I know what those things are, because I
have a
list of them; and I know whether one of the things I
want to do
is more vital to me than another, because I’ve
thought
about it.
One
exercise which I found useful earlier in life was to
work out
my lifetime goals. I didn’t invent this exercise – I
found it
recommended in a 1973 paperback by Alan Lakein,
who was,
according to the cover of the book, a renowned
time-management
consultant. I see from Amazon that Mr
Lakein
still has a couple of books in print, and you could do
worse than
have a look at them.
The
process of deciding your lifetime goals is quite
simple. You
sit down in front of a sheet of paper, and in a
couple of
minutes you write down the main things that you
would like
to achieve during your lifetime. Such as: get
married;
have six kids; win the pools; travel to China.
Whatever.
Next, you
answer the following question: How would I
like to
spend the next five years? I won’t even begin to
suggest
what you might write down here.
And
finally, you answer another question: If I knew
today that
I would be killed by lightning in exactly six
months
from now, how would I live until then? (Isaac
Asimov
answered this question by saying ‘I would type
faster.’ I
think he was joking. In any event Asimov died in
1992 from
Aids, an illness which he contracted through a
blood
transfusion nine years earlier.)
The next step
is to prioritise your goals. From the list of
lifetime
goals, you select the three most important.
You do the
same thing – choose the three most important
– from
your list of things to do in the next five years,
and from
the list of what you would choose to do if you
only had
six months to live.
You have
now identified nine key goals for your life.
At this
point you take a fresh piece of paper, and pick
out the
top three goals from your overall list of nine.
You have
now zeroed in on what it is that you really
want to do
with your life as you see the position at this
time.
Of course
your views will change as you grow older, and
perhaps
wiser, and for a number of years I used to do this
exercise
every time I had a birthday.
Once you
know what your main goals are, you need to
work out
the steps that you need to take in order to achieve
those
goals. For example, if you want to become the chief
executive
of your firm, you may feel that you need to get an
MBA
degree. After that, you need to arrange a transfer to
the
Baltimore office, so that you have some experience of
the
American branch of the business. And so on. Once
again, you
prioritise the steps which are necessary to
achieve
your goals, so that you have identified which are
the most
important – which are the ones you need to do
first.
You can go
on dividing and subdividing these tasks right
down to
working out what it is that you need to do later on
today. And
as a matter of fact I find it very useful to do so.
This may
seem like a cold-blooded and mechanistic way
of
planning life, and it certainly will not appeal to everyone.
I can only
say that I have found it extremely valuable, at
certain
stages of my life, to think in these terms and to
carry out
these exercises.
Since I am
now in my sixties, I no longer do the goalsplanning
exercise
in quite the same way. But, as every
‘retired’
person will tell you, you never have enough time to
do all the
things you want to do, even when you no longer
have to go
to the office. So I do think very carefully about
how I am
using my time. The writing of this book, for
instance,
was not undertaken lightly. It was placed in a
priority
list, and it had to wait several years to come to the
top of
that list.
Perhaps it
is also worth mentioning at this stage, since
we live in
such a hectic era, that when you plan your
schedule,
whether for the day or the year, you should build
into it a
certain amount of time when you do absolutely
nothing –
or at least something which is not directly
connected
with achieving particular goals. All work and no
play makes
Jill a hard-nosed, unattractive bitch. Your
Grandma
told you this, and much else besides. Remember
it.
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